Opinion A lesser team
India’s advance in the T20 tournament was fortuitous. It had to end sooner rather than later.
There will, of course, be much analysis of how exactly India’s T20 team was so thoroughly taken apart by the West Indies, and how India messed up a tournament that was theirs to lose. The moment of wreckage shouldn’t deflect from the truth, however. In fact, India were just a shadow of the champion side that subdued Australia and won the Asia Cup. In hindsight, maybe the favourite tag was illusory — after all, none of the sides that they had beaten had qualified for the semifinal. The likes of Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were hardly ever in contention.
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This isn’t to say that India were not equipped to mount a title challenge. They had the requisite ingredients but couldn’t put up a collective effort that propels a team to winning a global title, as in 2011 and 2007. Instead, they relied overly on a select few. Apart from Virat Kohli, none of the batsmen thrummed into top gear. The hitherto reliable opening pair of Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma were far from their destructive best. Suresh Raina — he bowled more balls than he faced — and Yuvraj Singh were not quite the audacious pair of yore. The bowlers were at best utilitarian, seldom menacing. There wasn’t a single bowler whom M.S. Dhoni could summon and be guaranteed a breakthrough. That they reached this far in itself owed as much to Kohli’s composure under duress as Dhoni’s intuitive captaincy, which deserted him in the semifinal generally and in the last over in particular.
There had been telltale signs of imminent doom as early as the first match, where New Zealand not only out-strategised India but also beat them at their own game. The famed twinkle toes of Indians, it seems, went AWOL. From there, it was about scraping through to the last four. The fortuitous run had to end sooner rather than later.
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